the lesser slurs

(there are a few in the post)

For about a month, I’ve had the following passage from the Financial Times sort of pinned to a mental corkboard with the note “…what?” scrawled on it:

Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

I revisited the mental corkboard after reading this post by S. Peter Davis, in which various figures, both Trump-y and very much not, seem to be running wild with their newfound freedom to say “retarded.”¹ They are mostly adults in their forties who have apparently longed for the freedom to say lesser slurs² and will not let this opportunity go to waste. Our top banker wants to talk at work like he’s a fourteen year old boy playing Call of Duty… and so, apparently, do a lot of people.

Should you call people “retard”? Predictably—as a woman who comes from a long and proud line of schoolmarms, I will say, no,³ but also—is there not a moment in one’s life when you are supposed to put childish things away? It’s not just the longing to be fourteen I find odd but the insistence on being fourteen at work. I find myself asking questions like: is this what happens when you stop making men wear ties to the office? They forget that self-censorship at work is at least 60% of being at work?⁴ Have people somehow grown into adults without ever quite realizing that in life we often behave different ways in different contexts?

And I guess one other thing, which is perhaps what I find personally irritating, is that these exchanges are weighted to one side. That is, if I am working in finance and somebody says “don’t be such a pussy” and I say “kill yourself” that probably will not be understood as responding to trash talk with trash talk. I imagine I’m supposed to go haha, you’re sooooo bad, or something like that. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. I’ll try telling somebody to kill himself as an act of social science and see how it goes.⁵

In any case, the thing is that if a teenager says “retard” I don’t assume s/he’s being nasty about people with Down’s syndrome.⁶ It’s the adults who bother me. They know that “retard” is not a neutral word because its non-neutrality is its whole appeal! Otherwise you could just use a word that has entirely floated free of any medical overtones it may have once possessed, like “idiot.”

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It’s not what I’d call the most pressing problem of our time—or even among the like, top twenty most pressing problems of our time—but it is a problem, what to do about low effort provocateurs. By “low effort” I mean that they aren’t doing anything like “ingesting paint and then making themselves throw the paint up,” which I’d call a high effort provocation. These are people who just want to be called a stinker. If you don’t do it they’ll even do it themselves eventually and just pretend you did.

And if you know yourself to be precisely the type of person (that is, a sober childless wine mom) that people seek to scandalize through this stuff, is the best course of action to yawn or to take the bait and say you know, that’s not very funny.…

The downsides of taking the bait are clear enough, but the problem with yawning is that some point it becomes hard to distinguish “a prudent refusal to be baited” from “cowardice” (internally, I mean; externally I don’t know that anybody can ever really tell). There is a third option, the “say ‘kill yourself’” option, which means responding not with disapproval but with an actual appetite for a fight. In truth this is probably the best option, if you have the taste for it, but I don’t think you can execute it all that well online. Decisive social humiliation only works if you and the other person share a social context where you are clearly the victor.⁷ That doesn’t exist online, where, for good or for ill, there is always a crew of friends one can run crying to who will pump you right back up.⁸

1. Neither here nor there but recently I was reading a story out loud that used “retarded” as a medical term—it was from 1958—and I thought oh Fritz Lieber… you’re in it now…

2. What makes a slur “lesser,” you may ask? What makes it lesser is being willing to type it out in a post, frankly…

3. I like this post by my friend Veery on this subject. But I’d also say one thing that makes “retard” different from other slurs that have been quasi-rehabilitated is that it doesn’t seem to (and perhaps can’t) occupy a kind of affectionate in-group usage.

4. But then I think: don’t bankers usually wear ties to the office? I’ve never actually met one so I can’t say for sure… but I believe this to be the case. Thus ties, at least in this case, cannot be the load-bearing wall of decorum we foolishly removed.

5. A friend of mine actually got permabanned from X for making this point (not telling somebody to kill himself but rather saying that to do so would be responding in kind to sports trash talk).

6. This is one reason the 19 year old in a different piece who voted for Trump to have the freedom to say slurs doesn’t provoke the same what? in me. It’s like—no matter where life takes you, you will find this moment in your life acutely embarrassing, so you’ve already set into motion the contrapasso and there’s not really anything for me to do here.

7. Also, if you decide to have a fight, you have to be ready to finish it. The knowledge I don’t have this follow-through in me is why I don’t end up having all that many. They’re just kind of boring to me.

8. Also people are always saying death threats and slurs to other people and at some point it’s just noise.